The first meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

On 9 February 1942 the four most senior commanders of the American armed forces met in Washington for the first time as a formally organised body: the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall; the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark; the Commander in Chief, United States Fleet, Admiral Ernest King; and the Chief of the Army Air Forces, Lieutenant General Henry Arnold. Their meeting marked the birth of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the body that throughout the war prepared the strategic decisions of the United States and advised President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as Commander-in-Chief.

It is often written that on this day the most senior American commanders discussed the strategy of the war formally for the first time. That needs qualifying. The same men had conferred with one another many times before, and since December 1941 they had sat at the same table with the British. What was new was that for the first time they met as a permanent, separate body, with its own secretariat and agenda, rather than as participants in ad hoc conferences.

The British model and the American gap

The immediate reason for the body’s creation was the Arcadia Conference, held in Washington from 22 December 1941 to 14 January 1942. There Winston Churchill and Roosevelt decided that the common strategy of the Western Allies would be directed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), made up of the British and American chiefs of staff. The terminology was settled too: from then on joint denoted cooperation between the services of a single country, and combined cooperation between allies. The Combined Chiefs began meeting at the end of January. The British were represented on it by a permanent military mission in Washington headed by Field Marshal John Dill.

At that table the difference between the allies was immediately apparent. Since the 1920s the British had had a smoothly working Chiefs of Staff Committee, in which the heads of the army, navy and air force jointly prepared positions for the government, and its members came to conferences with agreed memoranda. The Americans had only the Joint Army and Navy Board, set up in 1903 in the light of the Spanish–American War. In July 1939 Roosevelt placed it directly under himself, and its planners drew up war plans, including Rainbow 5, but the board had no executive authority, no proper staff of its own and no means of imposing a common view on the army or the navy. The army and the navy came under two separate departments, the War Department and the Navy Department, and frequently quarrelled over money, equipment and priorities. Faced with a well-drilled British team, the Americans needed a body that would speak with one voice.

Four men at the table

The composition of the body was laid down by no statute but arose from the need to match the British partner. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff since September 1939, was its most important figure. The navy had two representatives: Stark was Chief of Naval Operations and King, since 20 December 1941, Commander in Chief of the US Fleet, and their responsibilities partly overlapped. Most interesting was Arnold’s inclusion. Formally he was Marshall’s subordinate, chief of the Army Air Forces and Deputy Chief of Staff for Air. On the British committee, however, sat the Chief of the Air Staff of the independent RAF, Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, and the Americans wanted his counterpart at the table. Marshall therefore brought Arnold in as an equal member. This gave the army two votes against the navy’s two, and gave the air arm, which dreamed of independence, a standing almost equal to that of the army and the navy. The navy never fully reconciled itself to this.

The secretary of the body, and at the same time of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, was Brigadier General Walter Bedell Smith, later chief of staff to General Dwight Eisenhower. Marshall had promoted him on 2 February 1942 precisely so that an American would head the joint secretariat, in which his deputy was the British Brigadier Vivian Dykes. At its first meeting the body began to take over the existing tasks of the Joint Board and its committees. Over the following weeks a network of committees grew up around the four chiefs: the joint staff planners, intelligence, transport and supply, largely modelled on the British committees with which they were to work. The old board formally continued to exist but lost its importance.

Without a charter

The body came into being without a statute, without a decree and without a written charter. Roosevelt issued no instrument defining its tasks, and according to American military historians this suited him: the chiefs of staff answered directly to him as Commander-in-Chief, bypassing the Secretaries of War and the Navy, Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, while he himself retained his freedom of decision. When in 1943 the chiefs of staff presented him with a draft charter, he declined to sign it, judging that it would add nothing and might hamper their work. Even so, by the end of February 1942 the Joint Chiefs had assumed a responsibility for the American war effort comparable to that of the Combined Chiefs for the common strategy of the Allies.

The first weeks of work were overshadowed by defeats in the Far East. The Japanese were breaking the defences of Malaya, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, and General Archibald Wavell’s Allied ABDA command, set up at the Arcadia Conference, was to last only a few weeks. The Joint Chiefs had to decide how many troops, aircraft and ships to send to Australia and the Pacific without breaking the “Germany first” principle agreed with the British. In March 1942 Roosevelt and Churchill divided responsibility for the theatres of war: the Pacific went to the Americans, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean to the British, while Europe and the Atlantic remained shared. On 30 March the Joint Chiefs divided the Pacific into two commands: the South West Pacific Area under General Douglas MacArthur and the Pacific Ocean Areas under Admiral Chester Nimitz.

From King to Leahy

The line-up of 9 February did not last long. The division of naval authority between Stark and King proved awkward, and in the eyes of some politicians and of the public Stark shared responsibility for the disaster at Pearl Harbor. Under Roosevelt’s executive order of 12 March 1942, on 26 March King also took over as Chief of Naval Operations, the only man in history to combine both posts. Stark went to London, where he commanded US naval forces in Europe. From then on the body had three members.

Marshall felt that a fourth was needed: someone to preside over the meetings and link the chiefs of staff with the President. He proposed Admiral William Leahy, a former Chief of Naval Operations and until the spring of 1942 ambassador to the Vichy government. On 20 July 1942 Leahy became Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief and began to preside over the meetings. He had neither the title of chairman nor authority over the others, serving rather as a link with the White House. Some studies date the beginning of the Joint Chiefs from that day, but their first formal meeting took place on 9 February. In this four-man composition – Leahy, Marshall, King and Arnold – the Joint Chiefs lasted until the end of the war.

Significance

Born of the need to match the British, the Joint Chiefs of Staff became the most important centre of American war planning. In April 1942 Marshall presented in London the American plan to build up forces in Britain and invade France. The Joint Chiefs argued with the British over when to open a second front, prepared the offensives in the Pacific, from Guadalcanal to the Marianas, and their members accompanied Roosevelt to all the great conferences, from Casablanca to Yalta. Arnold’s membership foreshadowed the creation of an independent air force.

After the war the makeshift arrangement of 1942 was made permanent. The National Security Act of 26 July 1947 gave the Joint Chiefs a legal basis, and its 1949 amendment created the office of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Joint Chiefs still operate today as the highest military body of the United States.